


The Set of Eyes that Pinned Him (Became His Version of a Kingdom)

by ShadowsLament



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 14:26:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17582579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsLament/pseuds/ShadowsLament
Summary: Their deal struck, Tommy leaves Alfie Solomons’ office with the man’s handkerchief in his pocket. With no memory of picking it up, and wondering what else he might have missed, Tommy decides to return the cloth. To test the waters. Alfie counters him turn after turn, word after word, and against every instinct, Tommy is fascinated. Enough, perhaps, to take a foolish risk.





	The Set of Eyes that Pinned Him (Became His Version of a Kingdom)

**Author's Note:**

> Such a small thing, the moment Alfie threw down that cloth for Tommy to use towards taking care of his nosebleed, but I've watched it over and again. Something about it tugged at me, made me think of Tommy picking it up instead of ignoring it, and now here we are. That first meeting holds, but I'll be altering the road these two take. I hope you enjoy it!

Outside the distillery, shrugging off the dirt and the dust of that place and into the semblance of warmth provided by his coat, Tommy put a hand in his pocket. A thing far softer and more malleable than a cigarette box gave way to his palm, teased the tips of four fingers. His brow creasing, Tommy drew out his hand, and with it, Alfie Solomons’ handkerchief.

The air took his expelled breath, gave it a shape like the smoke he’d been wanting. Inside of a moment passing it curled and dissipated, and then, then Tommy shook out the cloth. He hadn’t so much as glanced at the thing after Alfie had tossed it down, intent as he’d been on the man’s face. Those eyes like depthless water. The expressions that shifted quick as a current. A tongue that twisted threats into stories that seemed as idle as the sea. Tommy thought he’d had a handle on the entire transaction when he’d stood to leave, but looking down at the handkerchief, he had no recollection of picking it up in place of the cigarettes. 

What else he’d missed—“Shit.” 

Near the tail end of a sound like a sigh, Tommy turned on his heel.

* * *

“I read a book about the Arctic, right, those ill-fucking-fated attempts at what was termed exploration.” Alfie lifted his gaze up from the box of cigarettes sitting there on the opposite side of his desk, pinned it on Ollie. Slouched near the door, Ollie’s head was bowed, but cocked so the light shone off the shell of his ear. The man’s eyes narrowed, drifted over, searching out the cause of the sudden silence. Alfie acknowledged that show of attention paid with a nod. “By all accounts a fucking no-man’s land in terms of survival, that. Frigid water. Ice every-fucking-where. Glaciers, yeah, that came out of the blue to bite a man on the arse. You seeing this picture I’m painting, Ollie?”

As if attempting to bring it into focus, Ollie blinked.

“That man there,” Alfie pointed at the vacant chair across the way, “it’s in his fucking eyes, that landscape, if you see what I’m saying. Fucking beautiful, is what it is, but what about the fucking frostbite, mate? You gotta wonder, you do, if having a closer look around is worth tempting hypothermia, provoking one of those bizarre white bears, or some such shit that’d see your bones buried beneath six feet of bloody snow.”

His fingers might’ve worried his apron’s fold, but Ollie lifted his chin. He met Alfie’s eyes. “Is anything?”

Alfie leaned back in his chair until the springs squawked, which was about right, a proper response in and of itself. “Is any—What kind of question would that be? Fucking stupid.” He made a shooing motion, the lamplight meeting the golden faces of his rings with a wink. “Go.”

Once the door had firmly closed, Alfie steepled his fingers. He studied the cigarette box. A garish shade of yellow where it wasn’t a dingy white, where the typography had nothing to say. Smack in the center, a pretty little scene: pointless hills astride a river, a tidy forest of trees. An idyll at the mercy of a match and a stiff wind. Sweet fucking Aftons, that was Tommy Shelby’s cigarette of choice, then. 

Shifting forward, Alfie took hold of the box and turned it over. There was a bit of blood, wasn’t there, tucked into one corner. No telling if it was Tommy’s, that unexpected nosebleed, or if—

A knuckle struck the door’s glass pane. 

“What’d I tell you, Ollie, eh? The wood. Never the fucking glass.”

Ollie opened the door, and with just the one foot over the threshold, said, “Mister Shelby’s back.”

“Is he? Well, show him the fuck in, Ollie.” Alfie dropped the cigarettes on the desk. “Show him the fuck in.”

As the man himself stepped inside the office, Alfie saw that the temperature outside his humble establishment had gone and recorded itself in red on those high cheekbones. That his lips were in need of a lick of water or whiskey. And that his left hand was rather foolishly shielded in the pocket of that fine coat of his, but the right, well, now, that one held a familiar thing.

From long, lean fingers, Tommy let the handkerchief unfurl. “I believe this is yours.”

“I should be concerned, see, when it turns out my new business associate cannot tell the difference between a box and a bit of cloth. Bodes bad.” Alfie scraped a nail over the blood on that one corner, flicked the box hard enough to pitch it forward, to send it scraping across the desk and skittering away from the revolver that sat there still, a madman’s paperweight. “But to that, Thomas, all I can say, really, is wear your fucking glasses. Ain’t nothing wrong with a man in spectacles, nothing at all.”

“For a man such as yourself perhaps.” Tommy’s gaze dipped, it did, grazed each link in the chain Alfie wore ‘round his neck before landing on the lenses there at the dangling end. “On you I’ve no doubt they’re charming. On myself—“

“Like a fish in an aquarium tank, hmm? Or maybe one of those thousand fucking flies buzzin’ to beat the band out there by the river, is that what you’d have us believe you look like?” Alfie shook his head. “Nah, if I’ve told you to fuck off once—“

“I believe at this point you have indeed told me a hundred times, Mister Solomons.”

Alfie drew it out, the appearance of his smile. “Right you are.” Rising from his seat, leaning over the desk, he took the handkerchief and wound, wound, wound it around Tommy’s wrist. “The deal we made is binding, innit? It doesn’t make us friends, it doesn’t make us fucking family, but had you kept this little slip of cloth, all would’ve been well. I’d’ve let you hold onto it, as well as all that pale skin, every inch.” 

Tommy regarded Alfie with those crystalline eyes. Holding that steady and unblinking gaze, Alfie recalled the _Terror_ ’s fate, how it wrecked on some sharp water. Fucking boat didn’t deserve its name if it gave way as easy as all that. 

“Out there in the cold and the smog, just standing there as it were, it is my belief the inimitable Thomas Shelby would have come to that conclusion quick enough and all on his own.”

A curl of the fingers, a slight pressure applied to keep the cloth in place, and Tommy asked, “Why Timbuktu?”

“What’s that?”

“It wasn’t the gold or the salt that made a prosperous city out of dust, it was the books, Mister Solomons. The scholars. Should any such men still be around they’d hardly have a use for your broken cabinet. You’d gain nothing sending it there,” Tommy said, “so what would be the point?”

Alfie tugged on his beard, smoothed down the hairs that stood on their ends. “We’re talking about points now, yeah? If we must, then, but you’ll understand this is the first I’m hearin’ of it, the very idea that I should have one of those.”

“Yet from what I understand,” Tommy showed that deft left hand, knotting the handkerchief before retrieving his cigarettes, “you always do.”

There was fucking plenty to look at: little pieces of bric-a-brac stacked here and there; unsightly rubber stamps and ink bottles and the like; and Ollie just outside the door, arms crossed and pretending to not give a rat’s ass about the goings-on within Alfie’s office. Failing at his own game, Ollie was, darting sideways glances at Tommy as the man slipped one of the remaining cigarettes from the box. As he lit it and lifted it to his lips. That cloth covering his wrist, it hadn’t been pristine since the day Alfie acquired it, wouldn’t ever be mistaken for white, and still it turned out like the brightest fucking beacon.

Alfie ambled around his desk. Shuffled between its wooden ledge and Tommy. “It’s Alfie, isn’t it?”

In a moment that flickered around swaying smoke, that imprinted itself on Alfie’s next thought, and the one after that as well, Tommy’s lower lip blanched a pale pink beneath the slow scrape of his teeth. “Pardon?”

The desk bearing a bit of his weight, Alfie took in air studded with Tommy’s scent. A sweet and strange mix, that, cool as the weather. “My name.” With his head angled down, Alfie lifted his lashes same as he’d raise any other offensive weapon. “The one I would very much like you to use.” He smiled, kept it soft as his voice, a subtle little shift. “No more of this Mister Solomons and Mister Shelby nonsense, not in this room, not between us, all right?”

“All right,” Tommy echoed after a beat. “Alfie.”

“Now that’s just lovely.” Alfie leaned in, and bent over the wrist he took in between careful hands, tightened the knot Tommy had made. “You were wondering, I think, if you missed something besides pocketing this cloth. You came back here, asking after Timbuktu as if I don’t know it ain’t considered the end of the fucking earth any longer, when all you wanted was to go over it again. Our little deal.” Alfie pressed linen to skin, smoothed a thumb over the back of Tommy’s hand. “Let’s set your mind at ease, shall we.”

* * *

Tommy moved through the room he’d taken, bypassing its bare bones, the dresser and the bed, until he reached the broken back of the wooden chair positioned in front of the window. Parting curtains thin as gauze, he glanced up and down the street, vaguely aware of the two- and four-legged animals passing by.

His focus had gone slack, he’d exited the distillery and his grip on it had fucking slipped. Tommy knew that, and he knew how little it mattered. If Alfie Solomons wanted a man followed, it was done. If he wanted into the trench-dark back of Tommy’s mind, he managed it. And there he stayed.

“ _God_ —“ Tommy swallowed. His fingers spasmed on the curtain, firmed to clench it tighter. “Goddammit.” 

What the fuck he’d been thinking, knotting the handkerchief, not taking the first opportunity that presented itself to slip it from his wrist and let it loose, let it be taken up by the wind or by water—The cloth should chafe, should gnaw at his skin worse than any rope or pair of locked handcuffs. It shouldn’t rest there so easily, it shouldn’t hold on softly, warm as Alfie’s hands on Tommy’s wrist. 

Drawing up a breath that resisted like it had somehow threaded through each rib, Tommy turned his hand. Put a finger to the knot, scraped the nail against the cloth. It didn’t so much as budge. Wouldn’t have come undone, even if he’d—

A knock on the door cut a strident path across the room.

Tommy flickered a look from the bed to the dresser, from the only other chair in the room, backed against the opposite wall, to a narrow desk. Of all the things that might’ve sat among the clutter, there, shoved to the far side, was a tarnished crumb tray. Taking it up, Tommy tested the straight edge. Found it sharp enough.

With his left hand on the door’s rough woodgrain, Tommy waited. Listened. Let silence stretch along the length of the hallway before turning the handle, glancing out. He considered the copse of closed doors. The tacky wallpaper peeling away from the walls. The long and tattered rug pocked with cigarette burns, loose threads lapping at the baseboards. And on the floor at Tommy’s feet, the box that bore not a single marking.

Another searching look to confirm the hallway held no surprises, and then Tommy went down on his haunches, flipped the lid off the box.

A sheet of paper, folded in half, perched on top of the same scene repeated across more than half a dozen white boxes: a series of hills and a winding river, trees against a yellow sky. Tommy pressed the paper flat, found a few lines of cramped, slanted handwriting tucked in one corner.

_The world, if it had even a bit of fucking sense about it, would shudder at the thought of Tommy fucking Shelby going without one of these. As I do know that particular danger, I’m in a position to do something about it. Can’t have spontaneous fucking earthquakes upsetting my bakery, now can I? -Alfie_

Tommy read it again and snorted. It was in his head that if he only looked towards the mirror as he passed it to put the box on the bed he’d see that his lips had curled up at one corner. And so he didn’t look, not at the mirror and not at his cloth-covered wrist, but pushed through all of the useless shit strewn across the desk to find a match.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading; I hope you'll be back for more! Kudos and comments are most welcome and appreciated. (Fic title taken from Dermot Kennedy's "Glory.")


End file.
